Etsuko Kimura & Miguel Leiria Pereira | Audio

Inspired on the north sea of Japan.

"One winter afternoon the double-bassist Miguel Leiria Pereira played his short musical score for me, inspired by his lone driving experience at night, and I was simply awed by what he has created with the bass. His sound brought me into some cinematic space, accompanied with its borderless echo. In process of our recording, I improvised linguistic phrases one by one, flared in the back of my head, then suddenly it seemed to me that those separated words came down to form one sound-landscape in the air. All my words were improvisationally created, and no part of it has been prepared or written in advance. 'Lone Night Drive' is a unique piece which we were motivated from prepared phonetic source. The photograph displayed for this piece on my player is taken by Miguel himself."

(Etsuko Kimura)

"When me and the double-bassist Miguel Leiria Pereira were about to start performing our improvisational session at his studio, a postcard with a photo of a white owl, which was hung over his computer desk, caught my eyes, so in this piece I automatically jumped into story-telling about this bird called 'fukurou' in Japanese, which has driven me into mystic imagination. Miguel's musical performance was inviting me to navigate into the depth of nocturnal forest, and let me dream about the owl flying among those trees. His editing work is masterpiece as well as his sound dedication, as seen at the end of this track where his bass sound gently calls for dawn. Here I sang 'ho-, ho-', as Japanese onomatopoeia of an owl."

(Etsuko Kimura)

"Certain kind of landscape in our quotidian life gradually kills me off. Most of the time I feel like fainting or vomiting, in a psychiatric sense. In this landscape, I feel I don't exist anymore or feel disconnected from the rest of the world. There, I smell people's pretension behind materialistic society, where the humanity is dying. I have been carrying this warning sensation for my entire life against my background society, and I still don't know how to explain it. You see its people's frozen faces expressing no emotion with no body temperature, no physical contact. That is a dead nation with dead people. Now those people are trying to escape from that place, or those who can not get opportunity to leave have no other choice but to make up a sugar-coated illusion over their daily reality, to make themselves believe that they do not notice anything and that they are living happily. In this piece entitled 'Urban Paranoia', I am talking about this pink sweet image which comes from their hallucination, when they have dilemma in repeating their life in this kind of suffocating society. And in our musical session, the sound of the double-bassist Miguel Leiria Pereira has surprisingly corresponded to the essence from my words. Even if he did not have any knowledge of my Japanese language, he could sense it. The grafic work displayed for this piece on my player is created by courtesy of an artist Ricardo Mendanha, whose works I always find interesting."

(Etsuko Kimura)

"I accidentally started this piece, with such a simple word as 'ships', by visualizing it 'on a desert', then it has slowly come up to me to narrate its navigation, but I involved lots of different linguistic images inside, like 'industry', 'flames', 'coconut', 'raining', or 'dancing girls', to provoke contrast among the landscapes. After my improvised words which happen to pop out of my mouth having been recorded, I even discover myself further by hearing them later. This piece is another example where the double-bassist Miguel Leiria Pereira shows his extraordinary talent and versatility as a musician, and I have to confess that I've got chill from his performance during the whole session."